Ok, the title is a little bit of a misnomer, the original purpose was to build the ship I wanted within RAW (by retrofitting an old ir-3f system patrol ship, which can be bought for 1 ), and since it was a custom ship it'd be pointless to have secondary transponders, unless he made a whole bunch of these ships and sold them, and looking at it he could easily clear 0.7 million credits per ship by selling them for 2 million credits each.

So the build for the character is a smuggler:gambler/droid tech/shipwright/scientist/modder (and really he can pull it off as of shipwright, and most of those have about half the tree bought) with unmatched fortune signature ability, 3 brawn, 3 agility, 7 intellect (cybernetic brain implant), 2 cunning, 3 willpower, and 2 presence, and 6 ranks in mechanics (cybernetic implant Grant's a free rank of mechanics). Now, you're asking how can he be any good at gambling with a 2 in presence... the stroke of genius talent in both shipwright and scientists lets him substitute intellect for another attribute, so depending on your version of sabaac he he either counts cards the easy way OR he reverse engineers the random number generator algorithm, and reads his opponents to know what cards they have. And with unmatched fortune, second chances, etc. He rocks the check and wins the first ship plus enough credits to mod it, which is far less than normal because as a droid tech he's built his work force and with all those ranks of speaks binary... it's a very effective work force.

Basically there is on crazy difficult check involved...he's experienced enough as a shipwright to have schematic'ed the sleek carapace crafting down to simple difficulty mechanics but this check is the money maker... so he's pulling out all the stops. Unmatched fortune means that half the faces on a proficiency die either are or can be converted to a triumph, he has 6 or 7 yellow dice (intense focus from scientist let's him upgrade that green to another yellow), supreme double or nothing let's him double the number of triumphs so 0.5*2*(6 or 7) = 6 or 7 (with intense focus) triumphs on average and with 4 ranks of eye for detail, that's an additional 4 success converted to advantages before we factor in the other 3 to 4 proficiency dice and all those boost dice (improved speaks binary) and his assistant with the valuable facts talent granting him an automatic triumph. So on average, he's completely rocking this one critical mechanics check... and most of the triumphs being used for integrated systems (free one hp attachments, like a hyperdrive, high output ion turbines, luxury passenger compartments, etc.) and the advantages of which there are many being used for layered plating and maneuvering fins, btw he picked up a free hp by stripping off the hull and replacing it with the sleek carapace.

And after he wins/retrofits/sells the first ship the process is self sustaining in terms of credit flow at least until he's bought up all the available ir-3f's at which point he's a very rich man and he's achieved the objective of there being enough other ships like his (btw he kept the best out of thousands of retrofits for himself) that he can use secondary transponders and blend in.

Since he's replaced the hull he gets to choose what the ship looks like now, within reason, and it looks like a modernized sleeker consular (cause the ir-3f and consular have quite similar dimensions/frames) and he sells the ships under the name c170 charger retrofit (reference to tfor about a million credits less than what you could buy a consular, and it's a very comparable but better ship compared to a consular. The armament is kept the same as the baseline ir-3f to not run into licensing issues.

@EliasWindrider Why not just start a bakery in real life? hmmm donuts... I swear I never get the free time even to craft much less start a business in game.

1 hour ago, Eoen said:

@EliasWindrider Why not just start a bakery in real life? hmmm donuts... I swear I never get the free time even to craft much less start a business in game.

Although donuts are a wonderful idea, I think he is more into cheese. A lot of cheese. Maybe "Maître fromager"?

3 hours ago, Eoen said:

@EliasWindrider Why not just start a bakery in real life? hmmm donuts... I swear I never get the free time even to craft much less start a business in game.

The reason I don't have a donut business is i have never been very interested i baking (or deep frying as the case may be) but when i was 4 and someone asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up my answer was "make planes" I now have a master's in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT, a PhD in mechanical engineering, and have been working at a national lab for coming up on 10 years the last 6.5 of which I have been doing work related to satellites. So I'm living the dream and in a reality where making star ships was an option for me I'd be doing that, just like this character is. Like the character I'd be doing it for the love of starships and the money/credits are nice but they simply allow me to do what I enjoy doing. The characters objective if you read above was to be able to get secondary transponders on his own dream ship. In order for secondary transponders to be not pointless there has to be enough other similar ships for there to be a crowd he can blend into.

So his objective for the business was to manufacture a crowd he could hide in.

Being an engineer, I enjoy solving optimization problems.

From the character's perspective, credits are a way to effect change... when there's a cause he believes in he just writes a large "check" rather than risking his own life.

33 minutes ago, EliasWindrider said:

The reason I don't have a donut business is i have never been very interested i baking (or deep frying as the case may be) but when i was 4 and someone asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up my answer was "make planes" I now have a master's in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT, a PhD in mechanical engineering, and have been working at a national lab for coming up on 10 years the last 6.5 of which I have been doing work related to satellites. So I'm living the dream and in a reality where making star ships was an option for me I'd be doing that, just like this character is. Like the character I'd be doing it for the love of starships and the money/credits are nice but they simply allow me to do what I enjoy doing. The characters objective if you read above was to be able to get secondary transponders on his own dream ship. In order for secondary transponders to be not pointless there has to be enough other similar ships for there to be a crowd he can blend into.

So his objective for the business was to manufacture a crowd he could hide in.

Being an engineer, I enjoy solving optimization problems.

From the character's perspective, credits are a way to effect change... when there's a cause he believes in he just writes a large "check" rather than risking his own life.

Can you make the F-35 work affordably? Or better yet make a donut machine which lets us cook donuts outside in cold humid weather.

In all seriousness it sounds like your character is looking for a solution to a problem (s)he created. The obvious and cheaper answer is to mimic a preexisting ship hull and spoof sensors as best you can. I'm not sure mimicking a ship design noted for being used by the Jedi Order and the GAR is the healthiest choice in a rebellion era campaign. As for setting up a automated ship yard business, it seems like a possibly good base idea. Maybe the homestead rules can alleviate the tedious bookkeeping.

1 minute ago, Eoen said:

Can you make the F-35 work affordably? Or better yet make a donut machine which lets us cook donuts outside in cold humid weather.

In all seriousness it sounds like your character is looking for a solution to a problem (s)he created. The obvious and cheaper answer is to mimic a preexisting ship hull and spoof sensors as best you can. I'm not sure mimicking a ship design noted for being used by the Jedi Order and the GAR is the healthiest choice in a rebellion era campaign. As for setting up a automated ship yard business, it seems like a possibly good base idea.

F-35 is an easy problem to fix, ditch the marine version with vtol capability. Not a fan of making donuts so I won't bother with that one.

Technically the consular was associated with diplomatic corps (which occasionally included jedi) and the GAR. However, the reason to do bnb it is I like the way it looks. Also, the ir-3f doesn't have a hyperdrive stock so you'd have to disguise it as something else. It just happens to have a very similar frame to a consular, and the reason to retrofit the ir-3f is apart from the lack of a hyperdrive and weak hull it has excellent capabilities (and I'm a speed freak when it comes to flying vehicles, there aren't many base speed of 4 silhouette 5 ships).

11 minutes ago, EliasWindrider said:

base speed  of 4 silhouette 5 ships

There are actually the: Raider II-Class Corvette, DP20 Gunship, J-Type Diplomatic Barge are speed 4. The DP20 has a hyperdrive and you could probably automate away a bunch of the crew.

3 hours ago, Eoen said:

There are actually the: Raider II-Class Corvette, DP20 Gunship, J-Type Diplomatic Barge are speed 4. The DP20 has a hyperdrive and you could probably automate away a bunch of the crew.

That's not a long list. 2of those are dedicated war machines which makes acquiring the difficult. The j-type has the same price, a smaller crew, same passengers, much less enc, short (vs extreme) sensors, worse shields, no weapons or hp to add them, more consumables but not a lot more.